> “One of the more peculiar attempts to throw light on the question of whether drinking coffee is bad for one’s health’ was carried out in the 18th century by King Gustaf III of Sweden…. A pair of monozygotic twins had been sentenced to death for murder. Gustaf III commuted their death sentences to life imprisonment on the condition that one twin drank a large bowl of tea three times a day and that the other twin drank coffee. The twin who drank tea died first, aged 83-a remarkable age for the time. Thus the case was settled: coffee was the less dangerous of the two beverages. The king, on…

Which is grammatically correct? Honorable starts with an H so it should be a honorable but it's pronounced with an vowel so it can also be an honorable. I've heard the argument both ways , so which one is correct?

A basic grammar rule is to use an instead of a before a vowel sound. Given that historic is not pronounced with a silent h, I use “a historic”. Is this correct? What about heroic? Should be “It was a heroic act” or “It was an heroic act”?
I remember reading somewhere that the h is sometimes sile...

In the moring we set up a meeting to talk about software for project component X, as project component X is highest priority! Come the meeting in the afternoon and project component X is now least important and highest priority is project component Y, which I have nothing to do with. Yay!

@MattЭллен oh, that reminds me of when a toy store opened near my workplace, and I went there after work to look for Lego, and couldn't find any, so I asked the woman behind the cash if they had some, and she said, in the snootiest british accent I've ever heard, "We have MeccANo".

I was trying to figure out how a particular Lego Minecraft thing had been made. It looks like a brick, with a tile on top, but underneath has little triangle wedges, and they are upside down. I was amazed: had Lego finally made the two-sided plate?! But no. They used the new tile-on-bottom piece and just printed the minecraft ghost's face upside down.

@JohanLarsson I think vim only feels natural to people who are used to using vim. When I was using dos, we had full-screen editors that used the arrow keys to insert text just like a modern word processor.

The main power of vi is that it is made for typists. You don't have to look at the keyboard or use the mouse to do stuff. It’s command structure is [COUNT] VERB OBJECT, where COUNT is an optional integer repeat-count, VERB is something like d for delete, c for change, etc, and OBJECT is a motion command like w for word or $ for EOL. So 3dw or d3w both delete three words. If you double the edit command, like dd, cc, etc it means to do it to the whole line.

It also has memory buffers that you can put stuff into, or even append into. There isn’t just one single “mouse buffer” for copying and pasting.

The hardest part about vi for me was remembering that y is the copy cmd, standing for yank. So something like y} puts a copy of the text from the cursor through the end of the current paragraph or block into the default, unnamed buffer. You can use 'ay} to put it into buffer a, 'by} to put it into buffer b, etc. Then you go somewhere else in the file, and “put” the text (paste the buffer) using something like 'bp to put the b buffer after the cursor, etc.

You can also place "mark(er)s" in your file. These are then legal motion targets, and thus also lead arguments to edit commands. For example, ma marks the current cursor location as location a. Just saying 'a from anywhere is a sort of "goto a" motion command, while saying d'a would delete through the a mark.

I taught vi to incoming freshmen lo these thirty years ago and then some.

Now, vim for “vi improved” does much more, and this is reflected in that God-awful “cheat” sheet. But I have just given you the basic overview of the combinatoric command structure.

@RegDwigнt The “abbreviation” joputa generally gets the point across clearly enough in casual conversation. It punches a bit above bastard, more towards asshole. If you want something as strong as fucking assholes, you probably need to spell it out and maybe qualify it, too, like (esos malditos) hijos de puta. That sounds a bit formal; I’d have to rattle my head a bit for minute to think of something just as strong but shorter.

"To ask" already implies a question, which is similar to the Dutch verb "vragen", not so much "stellen" (to pose). In both Dutch and English, the default is to omit the preposition in that case. But similar as Dutch and English may be, prepositions are the major exception. My (native Dutch) mother invited the neighbor's kid and me (both 4 years old) to sit on the table, and we happily complied ;) — MSalters8 hours ago